SpecCharts: a VHDL front-end for embedded systems

VHDL and other hardware description languages are commonly used as specification languages during system design. However, the underlying model of those languages does not directly support the specification of embedded systems, making the task of specifying such systems tedious and error-prone. We introduce a new conceptual model, called Program-State Machines (PSM), that caters to embedded systems. We describe SpecCharts, a VHDL extension that supports capture of the PSM model. The extensions we describe can also be applied to other languages. SpecCharts can be easily incorporated into a VHDL design environment using automatic translation to VHDL. We highlight several experiments that demonstrate the advantages of significantly reduced specification time, fewer errors, and improved specification readability